The Spanish Earth

With Dziga Vertov’s Kino Pravda in Russia and the productions of the Film and Photo League in America, propagandistic documentaries were nothing new, but the scorching politics of the 1930s drew talented directors into the genre. Leni Riefenstahl, with the resources of the Nazi state at her command, borrowed from the Expressionist filmmakers to glorify Hitler and the 1934 party congress at Nuremberg. Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens, whose poetic documentaries were screened earlier in this series, shows himself to be the antithesis of Riefenstahl in his depiction of the Spanish Civil War.

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